My Summer Plans: Carpe Diem!

Howdy everybody! The semester is wrapping up with my last day of class today and I’m really excited to wrap this semester up and move on to my great summer adventure of studying abroad in Rome!

Before I get into Rome, I want to recap real quickly on a couple of highlights from this semester. First off, if you haven’t read about the mobile networked tactics game that I created in Mobile Games Programming this semester, be sure to read about it here! Aside from that, it was awesome to learn about Marketing techniques and work with a group of my peers to fully design a mobile application, SCheduler, that assists with event management and student scheduling as well as flesh out a full pricing and marketing strategy. Also, I just finished building out a simple compiler and optimizer for a custom ZombieC programming languages in my Professional C++ class, which was both intense and cool to see how a compiler really reads through code and uses the syntax and grammar to convert logical statements into a sequential ordering of commands. Finally, I loved getting to meet a bunch of y’all during the Viterbi Open House, and I want to give a huge shout out to all of you at the Viterbi Information Session for singing Happy Birthday! Sarah tweeted a great video below!

Now back to Rome! This summer, I am traveling to Rome with the Viterbi Overseas program, and I’m going to be learning about the history of Rome and advanced writing with my fellow engineers! I really love how Viterbi brings out faculty with us to teach our classes in English and make sure that we have just as good professors abroad as we do back home. Besides, my Italian is limited to just about “dov’è il bagno“?

I’ve actually been to Rome once before when I was in 7th grade. I went with my mom, dad, and brother (as you can see in the image at top), and while the churches and architecture clearly fascinated me at the time, I’m really excited to go now that I’m older and have a much better appreciation for what’s there. I’m also really excited to get to learn about the history of the city while I’m there, because there’s nothing like learning about Michelangelo on our way to the Sistine Chapel!

All in all, I’m looking forward to a very full and exciting summer in Rome, and I hope that I can continue with some of my iOS development in my spare time while I’m there. If all goes well, I could have a demo to throw up on my blog for y’all when I get back! I hope all of y’all are looking forward to great summers as well. Until next Fall!